As soon as the work visa is ready, I will be off to northern Chile to begin work on the Global Social Media Impact Study. As I wait, I have been reflecting on the aspects of my dissertation project that create a bridge between the seemingly disparate worlds of exhibition wrestling and online social media use. Below is an adapted passage from my dissertation that I think gets to the heart of the ways that these two projects inform one another.

When I began doing fieldwork for my dissertation in the spring of 2011, I met several luchadores and luchadoras for interviews. Most were between 20 and 35 and almost every one of them asked me at some point if I had “face.” Using the English word within otherwise purely Spanish dialogue, “tienes face?” they were asking if I used facebook. I quickly became “friends” with all of them on the social networking site as a way to stay in touch, especially during the four months that I returned to the United States at the end of 2011. And I quickly learned that for the luchadores of SuperCatch, facebook functioned as a way to stay in touch with many people abroad. My fellow Super Catch wrestlers saw the connections they were able to make on the internet as one of the most important ways of achieving international exposure. Whether inviting foreign luchadores to perform in La Paz or organizing their own trips to perform in Lima, Santiago, or Buenos Aires, Facebook was a primary way of connecting with different international groups of wrestlers. Often after a long afternoon of training in Don Mauricio’s ring, we would walk back to Avenida 16 de Julio and stop in one of the small restaurants for the daily special. After shoveling giant plates of silpancho, pique macho, or falso conejo into our mouths and washing them down with mocochinchi (a peach flavored drink), we would walk a block further to the small shop with several computers set up as an internet café. For just 50 centavos an hour we would sit in a row at the computers, and everyone had a browser tab open with Facebook. Of course the luchadores would look at their Paceño friends’ pictures and send birthday wishes to cousins or schoolmates, but they spent most of their time connecting with wrestlers from other countries. All of the luchadores were members of online virtual Facebook groups of South American and international wrestlers. Occasionally these groups would have scheduled discussions, and the Super Catch luchadores always made a point to participate. Discussions ranged from the latest WWE pay-per-view program to moves wrestlers were working on. But the most important were discussions about travel and the arrival of visiting wrestlers. I often would finish sending emails to friends in the U.S. and exhausting everything I could think of to look at on Facebook long before they finished their conversations with Peruvian, Mexican, and Spanish wrestlers. Sometimes I was relieved to be asked to translate an English language message that someone received from a U.S. wrestler just because it gave me something to do. We would stay at the internet shop sometimes for almost two hours, as I silently whined in my head that it was already 9pm and I just wanted to go home and sleep. But I slowly understood the importance of these interactions. For just 0.50 Bolivianos an hour (about $0.07) the luchadores were actively participating in what they saw as an international “community” of which they wanted to be a part.

This global networking online can be understood as a kind of imagined cosmopolitanism in which the SuperCatch luchadores’ desires to connect with other wrestlers overcome spatial constraints, allowing them to feel a sense of “worldliness through engagement, in whatever form, with the world’s goods and lifestyles” (Schein 1999:359). Here, the “lifestyle” of international wrestling legitimacy was practiced using the internet and membership in international groups. Shein draws on Anderson, using the notion of imagining to demonstrate the ways participants in cosmopolitanism may not necessarily meet face-to-face, but nonetheless fashion communities that are just as genuine as those created by people who share physical space. Though it is possible no all participants in these facebook interactions saw this form of sociality as a community, the SuperCatch luchadores were precisely interested in participating in what they understood as a community. They felt that being part of online communities would grant them more legitimacy than would simply being a part of local lucha libre circles. In many ways, they valued their international connections more highly, because they saw them as legitimizing, while they understood the local as degrading. As Schein point outs, it is electronic media that allows this sort of “supralocal transmission” to occur. The interactive nature of the internet (even if it was infuriatingly slow at times), allowed for a horizontal exchange that unlike media of television and film, “brings into possibility an imagining of community on the scale of the globe” (Schein 1999:359). Within these new communities identifications may be refashioned. For the luchadores, their involvement with wrestlers outside of Bolivia allowed them to see themselves and the group as part of “international lucha libre” despite the fact that they rarely if ever traveled to perform outside of Bolivia, and visits by foreign wrestling groups were only occasional. These connections allowed them to imagine the eradication of economic exclusions, and restrictions imposed by state borders that their own particular citizenship determined. Yet, even as cosmopolitan exchange allowed for the imagining of mobility, it was also conditioned by the endurance of relative physical immobility (Schein 1999:269) that the luchadores knew was part of their reality. Appadurai writes that “Fantasy is now a social practice” (1996:7) and many people long for horizontality described by Anderson (Appadurai 1983:7), without global differentials of power and wealth (Schein 1999:369). For the luchadores, these differentials were manifested in their desire for legitimacy. Yet legitimacy continued to be fleeting for the Super Catch luchadores. Clearly the reputation of Bolivian lucha libre among wrestlers outside of Bolivia was part of a global dynamic in which Bolivia either appeared invisible or was understood as derivative of better established wrestling traditions in Mexico or the United States. As Rocky Aliaga, a Bolivian who now wrestles professionally in Spain explained to me, people in other countries only knew what they saw of Bolivian lucha libre on the internet. “Aqui llega informacion de monstruos, momias, hombrelobos...En Bolivia hay talento y nuevos valores, pero sin dar oportunidad. Cada una lucha hasta tres veces para no dar oportunidad a jóvenes. Por eso se disfrazan de monstruos” [Here they find information about monsters, mummies, wolfmen…In Bolivia there is talent and new values, but without opportunity. Each match of three falls doesn’t give the opportunity to young wrestlers. That’s why they costume themselves as monsters]. Rocky confirms here what those luchadores still in Bolivia suspect: that in the larger world of exhibition wrestling they are seen either as a joke or as underdeveloped. But the luchadores often attribute this formation to the local dynamics of clowning rather than global processes

the foto in question

Over the course of my year of training as a luchadora, Edgar consistently used the feminine form of clowns, “payasas,” when referring to wrestlers that he felt had a low skill level. For several of the SuperCatch luchadores, the cholitas stood in as emblematic of the “problem.” In September of 2011, while in the United States for a few months, I posted some pictures of cholitas luchadoras from Titanes del Ring on facebook. Two days later, I noticed that Edgar had written in the comments section, “Por que muestras estas payasas de El Alto si tu hablaste con los mejores luchadores de Bolivia y los más antiguos? Si hasta criticabas a estos bueyes por que los promocionas? Hay grandes profesionales que puedes mostrar como LFX, Halcones del Ring, Super Catch…Que mal!” [Why do you show these female clowns from El Alto if you have talked with the best and oldest Bolivian wrestlers? Until you criticize these oxen, why do you promote them? There are great professionals you can show like LFX, Halcones del Ring, Super Catch…How awful!]. Anarkista, a luchador from GLLP in Santa Cruz, Bolivia agreed, “Bien dicho.... Sabemos que hay mejores luchadores que estas cosas.” [Well said…We know there are better wrestlers than these things]. I eventually removed the pictures, but the conversation they had evoked stuck with me. As a foreigner, putting pictures of the cholitas luchadoras on a website only exacerbated the “problem” male luchadores were working so hard to “correct.” To Edgar and Anarkista I was reinforcing the image of Bolivian lucha libre that they were constantly working against in front of an international audience. The luchadoras were the most visible example of Bolivian lucha libre outside of the country, but as Edgar explained to me many times, to the wrestlers of Super Catch they were not representative of the true talent within Bolivia. Thus, facebook became both a subject of study and an (accidental) methodological tool for further understanding the ways that imagined cosmopolitanism was at work among my wrestling partners.